December 24, 2009

we stand in solidarity with inclusive foundation and we condemn violence against queers in georgia

To the President of Georgia
To the Public Defender of Georgia
To the Diplomatic Services accredited in Georgia
To the representatives of International Organizations

On December 15 2009 at 7 pm the office of Inclusive Foundation, a well known Georgian LGBT organization, was raided by five armed men without uniform. The leaders of the organization together with about 15 community members of the ‘Women’s Club” were present in the office. They were ordered not to leave the room and were told that only their chief was of interest to them. The head of the organization, Paata Sabelashvili was taken to a separate room. Then the men made a telephone call and at about 8 pm an additional group of armed men came in. According to witnesses, they did not wear police uniforms (several of them put on jackets with the police inscription only in the office), they did not provide a search warrant, did not inform about their identity or agency they represented and did not explain the purpose of their intrusion.

Witnesses point out that several men reminded them that two witnesses had to be present during the search taking place in another room. Cell phones were confiscated, everyone was moved to a separate room where several men guarded them. Women were locked up in the room for several hours, they were not allowed to contact their families, they were humiliated by being called “perverts”, “sick persons”, Satanists. They were laughed at and several men told them that their photos would be taken and disseminated to reveal their sexual orientation. One of the unidentified men tore down a poster in the office. One of the leaders of the organization, Eka Agdgomelashvili, together with Tinatin Japaridze were threatened that they would be killed if they did not stop demanding search warrants and other official documents. Some of the armed men responded that “we will only show papers to those to whom we need to show them.”

Paata Sabelashvili, the leader of the organization, was arrested as a result of the raid. Soon after arrest he confessed to the possession of 8 grams of marijuana. However, because he made the confession before seeing his lawyer, without the presence of anyone except law enforcement officials, the validity and voluntary character of the confession is highly suspicious.

One of the armed men, distinct with homophobic statements and his aggressive behavior towards staff members, introduced himself as an Operative Officer of the Constitutional Security Department of the Ministry of Interior Giorgi Gegechkori. However, on the pretrial measure hearing of Paata Sabelashvili he appeared as Investigator David Khidesheli. Another man, who later turned out to be the head of the police division, threatened Eka Agdgomelashvili with killing if she immediately would not stop pointing out that they were violating the law. He shouted : “I will kill you!” “I will tear you into pieces!” After one of the staff members said that he was exceeding his powers, he shouted: “Sue me, I don’t give a damn”, “I am myself the Law and the Judge!”

Armed men searched through all bags of staff members in the office. Some of the bags were searched in another room when the owners were not present. Only after that they were returned to their owners. Two women officers forcibly took girls (often in pairs) to the bathroom, stripped them naked and searched them. The girls were humiliated and called “sick” in the process. There was no search protocol composed as a result of the search. Having finished the search, one of the women officers exclaimed that having seen these women, she began to hate women’s body.

Staff members of the organization are under continuous surveillance up till now. Their homes, movement in the city and office are under constant surveillance by cars full of men without uniform. One such car is permanently stationed outside the entrance to the house of one of the staff members.

The raid on the Inclusive Foundation represents a logical continuation of the policy of repression of non-governmental organizations conducted by the Georgian government. It aims at marginalizing, intimidating and discrediting human rights defenders in Georgia. One should have in mind the recent attacks on Georgian civic organizations: public broadcaster of Georgia recently aired a coverage about the alleged attempts of extortion by the members of NGO ‘Human Rights Priority’; Rustavi 2 publicized a defamatory news report about applications submitted by the Georgian Young Lawyers Association to the European Court of Human Rights; Officers of the Ministry of Interior threatened and attempted an extortion from the journalist of newspaper “Batumelebi”. Officers publicly implicated in the incident have not yet been punished despite the assurances by the Ministry of Interior.

We are concerned that particular character of the organization will be manipulated for the purposes of artificially nurturing the aggression of radical fundamentalist groups. It is noteworthy, that the Georgian government has been abstaining from defending the rights of its citizens in such situations. It portrays itself abroad as a victim of the internal clashes of liberal and fundamentalist groups, while internally it appeases to traditionally minded electorate. Hence, we are alarmed about the trend of purposeful discrediting and intimidation of the Georgian civil society leaders.

Therefore,

1) We protest the violation of basic rights, dignity, and identity of victims and demand that those persons, who performed the acts of verbal, psychological and physical violence against the members of the Inclusive Foundation be punished.

2) We demand the Georgian government to react to every similar incident as it is established by the law, conduct inquiries and punish those who perpetrate such acts

3) We appeal to international organizations and diplomatic services accredited in Tbilisi to thoroughly monitor the detention of Paata Sabelashvili and pressure the Georgian government for protection of his Constitutional rights. We ask for continuous monitoring of such incidents and for accountability of the Georgian government to defend the basic rights of its citizens.

4) Georgian media should follow the principle of the presumption of innocence of the individual and should refrain from publicizing unverified information.

5) Surveillance and intimidation of the members of the Inclusive Foundation should be immediately discontinued.

6) We appeal to the Public Defender of Georgia to investigate the instance of raid on the Inclusive Foundation and the arrest of its leader Paata Sabelashvili.

Description: A catalog of art interventions committed by Queering Yerevan between 2013-14 within the scope of the project titled “In and Between the (Re)public” as well as other texts that have informed and motivated these new works.Publication Date: November 1, 2014.Languages: Armenian and English.

Description: A catalog of art works and texts that have shaped the Queering Yerevan movement. It includes documentation from various exhibitions and art happenings, photography, critical texts, excerpts from experimental writing, fragments from the QY blog, and email correspondence from 2007-2011.

Contributors: Artists, writers, cultural critics, and activists who have worked or associated in some capacity with the QY movement.

էքսկուրսներ} {xcursions

The Youth Palace (1974-2006), one of the most Sapphic architectural sites in Yerevan.

հանրա(պետության) մեջ և միջև} {in and between the (re)public

January 1, 2013 – August 1, 2014

The Republic can be viewed as a mode of transition from the communist rule to a post-communist phase, especially with the springing up of new (in)dependent nation-states after the break-up of the Soviet Union. But what or who are the “publics” on which the (Re)public is based? Historian Joan Landes finds an etymological connection between “public” and “pubic,” marking the public sphere as gendered – for subjects who qualify to speak by ownership of a penis. The conventional binary opposition to public has been the private, but is the private not already included within the aggressive forms of privatization of the Republic? Private/public as distinguishable sites within the Republic are both fantasy through a kind of Deleuzian lens of the virtual – always referring to one another, distinguishable only in their discernible indiscernibility. Anthropologists Susan Gal and Gail Kligman refer to privates and publics in the post-socialist era as fractals – the privates within the publics within the privates and so on, wherein each fragment of the Republic is an image of private and public on larger and smaller scales. The images are multiplied within one another, containing and reproducing each other ad infinitum.

The Republic has been hegemonically designated as singular – both in form and in content. There is the Republic – the idealized structure of modern statehood to which all nations must aspire. And there is the Republic, “our” nation, “our” people as one collective body (fascism propagated by slogans such as “One nation, One culture” that canonize the “proper” and regulate possibilities within a cultural landscape). Within both singularities of the Republic, any notion of “public” is rendered meaningless through an oligarchy’s appropriation of the commons, forced mass migration, unprecedented levels of unemployment, and the draining from the population voices of resistance. But (re)-p-u-b-l-i-c-s are also in and between language that separates rather than unites, that foreignizes rather than domesticates. And there is, of course, time and displacement – as modernity epitomized by the concept of “now” is also characterized by forceful and constant revisions. Within this “new” era of “Republicanism” and “Democratization,” how can we discuss the specificity of the impact on bodies, on language, on memory, and the interfacial affective realm of the (virtual) embodiment of inbetweenness? How can the publics (de)scribe and reinscribe spaces through which to continue meaningful production of disc(our)ses?

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Մետրո.բարեկամություն ^ Metro.barekamutyun

տարօրինակելով թարգմանությունը} {queering translation

July 31 – August 1, 2010Zarubyan 34, Yerevan

Translation looms large among the cultural practices that at once join and separate us. We use intralingual translation to interpret verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language, we depend on interlingual translation to interpret the verbal signs of a foreign language, and we rely on intersemiotic translation to interpret verbal signs using signs of nonverbal sign systems. And yet, while other reflexes of thought are interrogated and revealed as situated knowledge, the assumption that cultural differences are bridged easily and transparently remains undisturbed. How can we critically engage with and pay more attention to the processes of such bridging? How can we problematize conceptions that render translation as objective and value-free? The effects of translation are felt both in the domestic and the foreign cultures, as, on the one hand, translation wields enormous power in the construction and representation of foreign entity, and on the other hand, translation enlists the foreign text in the development and revision of domestic values.

Because meaning is an effect of relations and differences among signifiers along a potentially endless chain in the Derridean sense, it is always differential and deferred, never present as an original unity. As a result, a translated text (cultural artifact) is the site of many different semantic possibilities that are fixed only provisionally in a certain translation based on varying cultural assumptions and interpretive choices, in specific social situations, in different historical periods.

Situating our inquiry in the crossings of the dominant post-Soviet culture in Armenia, queer spaces, and translation as a mode of subversion, we propose an examination of “foreign” or “queer” texts and cultural objects that violate, disrupt and revise dominant conceptual paradigms, research methodologies, and cultural practices in the parameters of the familiar, the habitual, or the homely. Coming from a slightly different angle, translation as a method of defamiliarization can be compared to the Butlerian conception of drag, which in its performativity complicates, parodies, and denaturalizes “reality” and its norms that standardize gender and sexuality. The purpose of such translation is to expose that what we come to understand to be “real,” “original,” or naturalized is, in fact, a changeable and revisable reality.

ԶՎԱՐԹ ԳԻՏՈՒԹՅՈՒՆԸ} {DIE FRÖHLICHE WISSENSCHAFT

WE HOMELESS ONES.—Among the Europeans of to-day there are not lacking those who may call themselves homeless ones in a way which is at once a distinction and an honor; it is by them that my secret wisdom and gaya scienza is especially to be laid to heart! For their lot is hard, their hope uncertain; it is a clever feat to devise consolation for them. But what good does it do! We children of the future, how could we be at home in the present? We are unfavorable to all ideals which could make us feel at home in this frail, broken-down, transition period; and as regards the "realities" thereof, we do not believe in their endurance. The ice which still carries has become very thin: the thawing wind blows; we ourselves, the homeless ones, are an agency that breaks the ice, and the other too thin "realities" . . . We "preserve" nothing, nor would we return to any past age, we are not at all "liberal," we do not labor for "progress," we do not need first to stop our ears to the song of the market-place and the sirens of the future—their song of "equal rights," "free society," "no longer either lords or slaves," does not allure us! We do not by any means think it desirable that the kingdom of righteousness and peace should be established on earth (because under any circumstances it would be the kingdom of the profoundest mediocrity).—F. Nietzsche. Joyful Wisdom. Trans. T. Common. 1886.

ընթացիկ նախագիծ} {project in progress

What is real about the city? What is imaginary or phantasmagorical in it? How does the city construct its dwellers’ subjectivities? How do the dwellers construct the city both as an imaginary landscape and a material site of inhabitance? How does the city map our bodies? How do our bodies map the cityscape? What is queer about the city? How is it possible to appropriate the semiotic urban landscape in a queer way and for queer ends? What kind of empowerment does such appropriation entail for marginalized queer communities? How is it possible to project a queer gaze onto the city through our subjective experiences and past memories, thus open space also for a retroactive appropriation? How do we map our bodies/selves onto the body of the city? What is queer about such mapping?

Queering Yerevan is a collaborative project of queer and straight artists, writers, cultural critics, and activists to be realized within the framework of the QY collective. It takes as its point of departure concrete mnemonic experiences of concrete queer artists in a specific time and space: Yerevan, 2000s.

The project of self-mapping is a research-based initiative that takes topography as both a material and medium, as a work of artistic symbolization and translation. Rather than offering a so-called “objective” mapping of the city space, the project of self-mapping can be imagined as a fabric woven from personal histories, half-forgotten, half-distorted memories, i.e., sites of remembering and erasure.

We will explore the radical possibilities of subversion through envisioning the city—its landscape, the social dynamics, places, people, movements—differently from predefined topographies, signs and symbols that bring out the politics of prohibition and licensing, inclusion and exclusion determined by the normative mechanisms of power. The project is about queering the city/map and also queering the self.